We were lucky enough to meet the SeaForester team in Estoril, Portugal last year as part of our Waterbreak sessions for the UN Ocean Conference. Thanks to that initial meeting, they’ve since become SeaTrees project partners - so we headed up to Peniche to meet Jan Verbeek, their Scientific Manager to get an update on their work.

We arrived in the fishing port of Peniche late afternoon and headed straight to the Polytechnic of Leira - a collaboration partner of SeaForester and the temporary home for their shipping container ‘Seeds-on-Wheels’. This innovative project uses the ‘green gravel’ technique to reforest the Portuguese coast.

We visited the labs to see how the kelp spores are grown on the gravel which eventually enables them to be deployed in the ocean.

Green gravel restoration work to date has been restricted to coastal areas near existing aquariums or lab facilities. But SeaForester is developing a mobile seaweed nursery unit that will bring commercial-scale seaweed cultivation technology to local communities where restoration action is needed.

So exciting to be able to capture this project in its early stages !

A couple of days later we rejoin the team a little further south in Cascais. Luke jumped in the water with Jan, Joao Silva (PHD student & SeaForester intern) and Alexandre Marques (Research Fellow at Mare - IP Leira) to check on the monitor the growth of the kelp.

We managed to sneak in some post-dive interviews at the Clube Naval de Cascais and spend some time with Founder of SeaForester Pal Bakken.

What strikes me about this project, and this group of passionate marine scientists is the entrepreneurial spirit in which they work - we need organisations like SeaForester, willing to try stuff out, to test, to pivot, to learn - and to come up with crazy ideas and find the people and the ways to bring them to life.